How to Apply to Forrester Research

13 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 9 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • Forrester is a roughly 2,000-person, $430 million-revenue independent research and advisory firm headquartered at 60 Acorn Park Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and traded on NASDAQ under the symbol FORR.
  • George F. Colony has been Chairman and CEO since founding the firm in 1983, an unusually long founder tenure that shapes the firm's culture, point of view, and long-term orientation.
  • All hiring runs through Workday at forrester.wd501.myworkdayjobs.com/careers, accessible via the SEARCH AND APPLY button on forrester.com/careers. Applying anywhere else does not enter the official pipeline.
  • The firm typically maintains twenty to forty open requisitions concentrated in analyst, sales, consulting, customer success, software engineering, finance, and corporate services roles, mostly in Cambridge, Charlotte, Washington DC, select remote-eligible US locations, and European markets.
  • Analyst-track roles are uniquely demanding: expect a writing sample, a live research briefing or presentation, and senior interviewers who test your point of view rather than your resume.
  • Expect a four to eight week process across four to five rounds. Senior analyst and principal analyst searches can run longer.
  • Recent context matters: Forrester reduced headcount in early 2024, divested FeedbackNow in 2024, and has been hiring selectively with a clear lean into AI-related coverage and roles.
  • Forrester competes with Gartner, which is roughly fifteen times larger. Candidates should understand the cultural implications of working at a smaller, more opinion-driven research firm rather than at a scale player.

About Forrester Research

Forrester Research, Inc. (NASDAQ: FORR) is one of the most influential independent research and advisory firms in the technology industry. Founded in 1983 by George F. Colony, who still serves as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer more than four decades later, Forrester is headquartered at 60 Acorn Park Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and employs roughly 2,000 people across offices in the United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. The firm reported approximately $430 million in revenue in its most recent fiscal year and serves business and technology leaders at thousands of companies worldwide, from Fortune 500 enterprises to high-growth challengers. Forrester is best known for the Forrester Wave, the firm's signature comparative evaluation methodology that ranks technology vendors across criteria-driven scorecards on a two-axis graphic. A Wave leader, strong performer, contender, or challenger position carries real weight in enterprise software buying cycles, which is why analysts who write Waves often become well-known voices in their domains. The current product portfolio is anchored by Forrester Decisions, a subscription research and guidance service that bundles role-based research, peer discussions, and analyst inquiry. Surrounding it are Consulting (custom advisory engagements that often follow research subscriptions), Certification (professional credentialing), and the firm's events business, which includes annual flagship gatherings such as B2B Summit, CX Summit, and Technology & Innovation Summit. In 2024, Forrester divested FeedbackNow, the customer experience measurement business it had acquired years earlier, sharpening focus on its core research and advisory engine. Forrester operates in a category usually summarized as analyst-led research, and its primary publicly traded peer is Gartner, a much larger competitor with roughly fifteen times the headcount and revenue. That size gap shapes the experience of working at Forrester in ways candidates should understand before applying. Forrester is selective about coverage areas, leans into a smaller and more opinionated bench of analysts, and tends to compete on the depth and point of view of individual experts rather than the breadth of an industrial-scale research factory. The firm has visibly leaned into generative AI as a research priority, with analysts publishing on AI-native enterprise architectures, agentic workflows, AI-powered marketing, and the security implications of model adoption. Forrester reduced headcount in early 2024 as part of a broader restructuring, and has since been hiring selectively across analyst, sales, software engineering, and corporate functions, reflecting a strategy focused on the highest-leverage roles rather than rapid expansion. Hybrid work is the norm: most roles expect a blend of remote and in-office time, with Cambridge serving as the cultural anchor.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Start at the corporate careers page at forrester

    Start at the corporate careers page at forrester.com/careers, where the SEARCH AND APPLY button routes directly into Forrester's Workday tenant at forrester.wd501.myworkdayjobs.com/careers. Plan to submit applications through Workday rather than emailing recruiters or using third-party aggregators, since Workday is the system of record for every active opening.

  2. 2
    Create a Workday candidate profile the first time you apply

    Create a Workday candidate profile the first time you apply. Workday will let you upload a resume and parse it into structured fields for work history, education, and skills. Always review the parsed output before submitting, because Workday's parser frequently splits dates incorrectly, drops bullet sub-points, and mis-tags job titles, especially for hyphenated roles or non-US date formats.

  3. 3
    Filter the Workday job list by location, full-time or part-time status, and job

    Filter the Workday job list by location, full-time or part-time status, and job category to focus your search. Forrester typically maintains roughly twenty to forty open requisitions at any given time, so the list is small enough to scan in a single sitting. Cambridge MA, Charlotte NC, Washington DC, several remote-eligible US states, and a handful of European cities including London and German-speaking markets show up most often.

  4. 4
    Tailor your resume to the specific requisition before you upload it

    Tailor your resume to the specific requisition before you upload it. Forrester's Workday tenant scores keyword overlap between the requisition text and your application materials, and recruiters use that signal alongside human review to triage. For analyst roles, mirror the language of the coverage area, the named methodology if any (Wave, Forrester Decisions, etc.), and the seniority level. For sales roles, surface named accounts, segment language (SLED, Federal, End User, Enterprise), and quota attainment.

  5. 5
    Submit a tailored cover letter for analyst, principal analyst, and consulting ro

    Submit a tailored cover letter for analyst, principal analyst, and consulting roles even when the field is marked optional. These are voice-driven jobs, and a well-written letter functions as an audition for the kind of writing the role demands every day. For sales, customer success, and engineering roles, a short letter is helpful but not essential.

  6. 6
    Expect an initial recruiter screen within one to three weeks of applying for act

    Expect an initial recruiter screen within one to three weeks of applying for actively prioritized requisitions. Forrester's talent acquisition team typically opens with a thirty-minute phone or video call covering motivation, compensation expectations, work authorization, and basic role fit. This is the gating step before functional interviews are scheduled.

  7. 7
    Plan for a multi-round process after the recruiter screen

    Plan for a multi-round process after the recruiter screen. Most non-analyst roles run four to five rounds across hiring manager, peer, cross-functional stakeholder, and skip-level interviews. Analyst tracks add a written sample review and a live presentation or research briefing. Total elapsed time from application to offer commonly runs four to eight weeks; senior analyst and principal analyst searches can run longer.

  8. 8
    Watch the Workday status flags for movement

    Watch the Workday status flags for movement. Workday shows application states such as Under Consideration, In Progress, and Not Selected, and Forrester recruiters tend to update statuses promptly when decisions are made. Do not rely on email alone; log into the Workday candidate portal periodically to check status.

Resume Tips for Forrester Research

recommended

Lead with the kind of work you want to do at Forrester, not the work you have al

Lead with the kind of work you want to do at Forrester, not the work you have already done. Forrester analysts and consultants live by a strong point of view, so a one or two line professional summary that names your domain, your perspective, and the audience you serve will land harder than a generic objective statement.

recommended

For analyst track roles, foreground published thinking

For analyst track roles, foreground published thinking. Forrester hires senior and principal analysts as established experts with audiences, so list bylined research reports, conference talks, podcast appearances, named methodology contributions, and any analyst-relations engagement with vendors. A link to a personal blog, Substack, or LinkedIn newsletter with consistent, opinionated writing is a meaningful asset.

recommended

Quantify impact in the language buyers and CIOs use

Quantify impact in the language buyers and CIOs use. Replace vague phrases like 'led research initiatives' with specific outcomes such as 'authored the Forrester Wave for X covering twelve vendors, cited in four major analyst-relations campaigns' or 'advised twenty Fortune 500 CIOs on Y migration strategy, influencing approximately $200M in annual technology spend.' Forrester evaluates analyst candidates on influence, not activity.

recommended

For sales roles, show enterprise complexity

For sales roles, show enterprise complexity. Forrester sells multi-year subscription contracts to senior buyers, so call out average deal size, sales cycle length, named logos, multi-stakeholder pursuits, and any experience selling research, advisory, consulting, or other intangible knowledge products. Quota attainment in three to five recent years should be visible at a glance.

recommended

For consulting roles, frame engagements like case studies

For consulting roles, frame engagements like case studies. Each line should answer who the client was at a high level, what the question was, what you actually did, and what changed. Forrester consulting work is often grounded in proprietary research, so demonstrating fluency translating analyst frameworks into client-specific recommendations is a meaningful differentiator.

recommended

For software engineering, data, and product roles, treat the resume as a technic

For software engineering, data, and product roles, treat the resume as a technical artifact. Name languages, frameworks, cloud providers, observability stacks, and data platforms explicitly. Forrester runs a content and subscription platform that serves a high-value but relatively small concurrent audience, so depth of engineering judgment matters more than scale-of-traffic war stories.

recommended

Use a clean, single-column, ATS-safe layout

Use a clean, single-column, ATS-safe layout. Workday's resume parser handles standard fonts, simple section headers (Experience, Education, Skills), and consistent date formats well. Avoid tables, text boxes, multi-column layouts, headers and footers, and embedded graphics, all of which routinely break Workday's parser and force recruiters to read raw text from a degraded preview.

recommended

Submit a PDF unless the requisition explicitly asks for Word

Submit a PDF unless the requisition explicitly asks for Word. PDFs preserve typography and layout, which matters when your resume is read by a hiring manager after Workday's initial parse. Name the file with a recognizable convention such as 'Last_First_Forrester_RoleName.pdf' so that recruiters can find it later in the system.

recommended

Mention writing samples even when not requested

Mention writing samples even when not requested. For any analyst, content marketing, communications, research operations, or thought leadership role, a single sentence offering writing samples on request signals confidence and gives the recruiter a low-friction way to advance you.

recommended

Match the tone of Forrester's own published voice

Match the tone of Forrester's own published voice. Read three or four current Forrester blog posts in the area you want to work, notice the cadence and the willingness to take a position, and let your resume bullets carry a sliver of that same confident-but-evidence-grounded register.

ATS System: Workday

Forrester runs its global recruiting on Workday, the same human capital management platform used by a large share of mid-cap and large-cap public companies. The candidate-facing site lives at forrester.wd501.myworkdayjobs.com/careers and is reached via the SEARCH AND APPLY button on forrester.com/careers. The wd501 prefix indicates the specific Workday data center cluster Forrester's tenant is hosted on; this is normal Workday URL convention and does not affect candidates. As of the most recent check, the tenant lists approximately thirty active requisitions across analyst, sales, consulting, customer success, software engineering, finance, and corporate services roles, with a strong concentration in Cambridge, Charlotte, Washington DC, and select European markets.

  • Build your Workday profile carefully the first time. Once Forrester's tenant has your profile, returning to apply for additional roles is a single-click experience. A sloppy first profile means every subsequent application carries the same parsing errors.
  • Always review the parsed resume fields. Workday's resume parser misreads dates, hyphenated titles, and non-US conventions surprisingly often. Walk every field, fix anything that does not match your resume verbatim, and pay particular attention to current vs prior employment flags.
  • Use plain text bullets rather than special characters. Workday parsers handle standard hyphens and bullets cleanly but stumble on decorative characters, em-dashes used as bullets, and emoji.
  • Mirror the requisition's exact wording in your skills and experience sections when honestly applicable. Workday surfaces keyword overlap to recruiters in the candidate dashboard, and matching the precise phrase ('Forrester Wave', 'Forrester Decisions', 'principal analyst', 'enterprise account executive', 'SLED', 'Federal') improves visibility without resorting to keyword stuffing.
  • Apply to one role at a time and tailor the application. Bulk-applying to many requisitions inside a single tenant is visible to internal recruiters in Workday and signals lack of focus, which is particularly costly for senior analyst and principal analyst roles where domain alignment matters more than headcount throughput.
  • Keep your Workday profile current after you apply. Forrester recruiters sometimes source from prior applicant pools when new requisitions open, especially in analyst coverage areas, so an up-to-date profile increases the odds of being re-engaged for a future opening.

Interview Culture

Forrester interviews are deliberate, conversational, and weighted heavily toward written and verbal communication.

The firm's product is the considered judgment of its analysts and consultants, so every interviewer is implicitly evaluating whether you can hold a clear point of view, defend it under polite challenge, and write it down in a way clients will pay to read. The typical funnel begins with a thirty-minute recruiter screen covering motivation, compensation, work authorization, and high-level fit. From there, candidates move into a sequence of four to five rounds. The hiring manager interview comes first and explores domain depth, prior accomplishments, and how you would prioritize the role's first ninety days. Peer interviews follow, often with two or three colleagues on the same team, and these tend to drill into collaboration style, how you handle disagreement, and how you give and receive feedback in a research environment. Cross-functional interviews connect candidates with stakeholders in adjacent teams, since analysts work closely with consulting, sales, and events; consultants work closely with research and analyst relations; sales works closely with research and customer success. A skip-level conversation with a vice president or research director usually closes out the loop, particularly for senior individual contributor roles. For analyst-track positions, expect two assignments embedded in the loop. The first is a writing sample request: Forrester wants to see how you reason on the page, so be ready to share a polished, opinionated, evidence-grounded piece on your coverage area, ideally something that has been published or used with real readers. The second is a presentation or briefing exercise. You will be given a topic in your domain a few days in advance, asked to build a short deck (typically twenty to thirty minutes), and present it to a panel that may include peer analysts, a research director, and occasionally an executive. The panel will ask probing questions during and after, and the goal is to evaluate not only the content but the way you respond to challenge, refine your view in real time, and frame implications for an enterprise buyer audience. Behavioral interviewing is consistent across roles. Expect classic structured questions such as 'tell me about a time you had to deliver difficult feedback to a senior stakeholder' or 'walk me through a moment when you changed your mind based on new evidence.' Forrester values intellectual honesty, so interviewers reward candidates who can describe a wrong call, what they learned, and how they updated. Sales candidates additionally walk through specific deal stories, qualification frameworks, and territory plans, and engineering candidates work through technical scenarios appropriate to the level. The overall tone of every interview is collegial and curious, and candidates who treat the conversation as a real exchange of ideas tend to fare better than those who deliver memorized answers.

What Forrester Research Looks For

  • A demonstrable point of view in your domain. Forrester sells expert opinion, and every hiring loop is implicitly asking whether you can hold and defend a position that an enterprise buyer would pay to hear.
  • Strong written communication. Forrester's product is fundamentally written, and clear, structured, opinionated writing is the single most valuable skill across analyst, consulting, marketing, and many engineering roles.
  • Curiosity and customer obsession. The firm describes itself as 'bold' and lists curiosity, courage, and customer obsession as the engines of its work. Candidates who can ground every story in what the customer needed, what they learned, and what they did differently next time stand out.
  • Comfort working with senior buyers. Forrester analysts brief CIOs, CMOs, CISOs, and chief data officers; consultants advise the same audience; sales executives sell to them. Calm, well-prepared executive presence matters at every level.
  • Domain depth over breadth for senior analyst tracks. The firm hires analysts as established experts in a specific area such as security and risk, B2B demand and ABM, enterprise architecture, customer experience, marketing, or data and AI. Generalists with no deep coverage area rarely advance for senior or principal analyst roles.
  • Intellectual honesty and updateability. Interviewers reward candidates who can describe a time they were wrong, what they learned, and how their view evolved. Defensive candidates do not do well in this culture.
  • Collaboration across functions. Research, consulting, sales, customer success, marketing, and events depend on each other. Forrester looks for people who can move credibly across those interfaces.
  • Hybrid-work fluency. The firm has settled on a hybrid model that expects in-office presence on some days and remote work on others. Candidates who articulate a clear, productive personal rhythm for that mix do better than candidates who treat the question as a logistical detail.

Frequently Asked Questions

What ATS does Forrester Research use, and what is the actual application URL?
Forrester uses Workday for global recruiting. The candidate-facing portal is at forrester.wd501.myworkdayjobs.com/careers, and the SEARCH AND APPLY button on forrester.com/careers routes directly to it. Applying through Workday is the only way into Forrester's official pipeline; emailed resumes and third-party aggregator applications generally do not get tracked the same way.
Where is Forrester Research headquartered, and where do most jobs sit?
Forrester is headquartered at 60 Acorn Park Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Cambridge remains the cultural and operational anchor for the firm. A substantial share of open requisitions are based in or anchored to Cambridge, with additional concentrations in Charlotte NC, Washington DC, several remote-eligible US states, the United Kingdom, and select German-speaking markets in Europe.
Who is the CEO of Forrester Research?
George F. Colony, who founded the firm in 1983, has served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for more than four decades. His unusually long founder-CEO tenure is one of the longest among public technology research firms and shapes Forrester's culture, point of view, and long-term orientation. Candidates should expect interviewers to take strategy and product decisions seriously across long time horizons.
How many employees does Forrester have, and how does it compare to Gartner?
Forrester employs roughly 2,000 people worldwide and reported approximately $430 million in revenue in its most recent fiscal year. Its primary publicly traded peer, Gartner, is roughly fifteen times larger by both employee count and revenue. The size gap means Forrester competes on depth and point of view rather than scale, and analysts often have more individual visibility and influence over their coverage area than they would at a larger firm.
What is the Forrester Wave, and why does it matter for candidates?
The Forrester Wave is the firm's signature comparative evaluation methodology. A Wave evaluates a defined set of vendors in a category against criteria-driven scorecards and plots the results on a two-axis graphic that distinguishes leaders, strong performers, contenders, and challengers. Wave reports are central to enterprise software buying cycles and to vendor analyst-relations programs. For candidates, this means familiarity with how Waves work, having read recent Waves in your area, and being able to discuss methodology critically is meaningful preparation, especially for analyst, research operations, and analyst-relations facing roles.
What kinds of roles does Forrester typically hire?
Forrester's open requisitions tend to cluster in five families. The analyst track includes Senior Analyst and Principal Analyst roles for established experts in domains such as security and risk, customer experience, B2B demand and ABM, enterprise architecture, data and AI, and marketing. Sales hires include Account Executives, Account Directors, and Senior Account Managers across End User, SLED, and Federal segments, with long sales cycles selling research and advisory subscriptions to Fortune 500 buyers. Consulting roles deliver custom advisory engagements grounded in research. Customer Success roles support existing subscribers. Engineering, data, and product roles support Forrester's research and subscription platform. There are also rotating openings in finance, FP&A, sales enablement, communications, and corporate services, plus a small internship cohort each year.
What is the interview process like at Forrester?
Plan for a recruiter screen followed by four to five rounds across hiring manager, peer, cross-functional, and skip-level interviewers. For analyst-track roles, the loop includes a written sample review and a live research briefing or presentation, typically twenty to thirty minutes built from a topic given a few days in advance and presented to a panel. Sales candidates walk through specific deal stories, qualification frameworks, and territory planning; engineering candidates work through level-appropriate technical scenarios. Total elapsed time runs four to eight weeks for most roles and longer for senior analyst and principal analyst searches. Behavioral questions throughout reward intellectual honesty, evidence-grounded reasoning, and the ability to update your view under polite challenge.
Does Forrester support hybrid or remote work?
Yes. Forrester operates a hybrid model that expects most employees to spend some days in the office and some days working remotely. Specific in-office expectations vary by team and location. A meaningful subset of requisitions, particularly in sales and account development, are explicitly remote within a country or region. Cambridge MA remains the cultural center of the firm, and candidates within commuting distance of Cambridge should expect the strongest in-office cadence.
Was Forrester affected by the 2024 layoffs and the FeedbackNow divestiture?
Yes. Forrester reduced headcount in early 2024 as part of a broader restructuring focused on the highest-leverage roles, and the firm divested its FeedbackNow customer experience measurement business later in 2024. Both moves signal a sharper focus on the core research and advisory engine. Candidates should understand that current hiring is selective and quality-led rather than expansion-driven, and that interviewers will look for clear evidence that a hire moves a specific business or research outcome forward.
Does Forrester hire for generative AI roles?
Yes, and AI is one of the firm's clearest current investment areas. Forrester analysts publish actively on generative AI, agentic workflows, AI-native enterprise architecture, AI-powered marketing, and the security and risk implications of model adoption. Open requisitions visibly include analyst, data, and engineering roles oriented around AI, and analyst candidates with credible published thinking on AI in a specific enterprise function tend to be in particularly strong demand.
What does Forrester pay, and how is compensation structured?
Forrester does not publish a comprehensive compensation grid externally, but as a publicly traded research firm it benchmarks roles against industry peers. Analyst and principal analyst total compensation is structured around base salary plus an annual bonus, with senior analysts and above typically earning meaningfully more as their published influence grows. Sales roles use a base plus variable structure tied to quota attainment, with on-target earnings appropriate to enterprise software-style sales cycles. Equity participation through Forrester's stock is part of the package for many roles. Specific ranges are discussed during the recruiter screen; in jurisdictions with pay transparency requirements such as Colorado, California, New York, and Washington, ranges appear directly on the Workday requisition.
How should I prepare for a Forrester analyst presentation interview?
Treat the presentation as a real research briefing, not a job-interview deck. Pick a clear point of view on the assigned topic, ground it in two or three specific data points or examples, name the implication for an enterprise buyer audience, and rehearse delivering it in the time allotted with room for questions. Anticipate that interviewers will probe the weakest link in your argument; prepare to defend it once and then update if their challenge is genuinely better than your initial framing. The willingness to update is itself part of what is being evaluated.
Does Forrester offer internships?
Yes. Forrester runs a modest internship program that rotates through research, marketing, sales operations, and corporate functions, typically posted on the Workday tenant in the late winter and spring for summer cohorts. Interns are based primarily out of Cambridge, with select roles in other US offices. Strong intern performance is sometimes a path to full-time research associate or sales development roles after graduation.

Open Positions

Forrester Research currently has 9 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 9 open positions at Forrester Research

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Sources

  1. Forrester Careers - Official Career Site —
  2. Forrester Workday Career Portal - Search and Apply —
  3. Forrester Research, Inc. - About Us and Company Overview —
  4. Forrester Research - Investor Relations (NASDAQ: FORR) —
  5. Forrester Wave Research Methodology —
  6. Forrester Decisions - Research and Advisory Service —
  7. Forrester Research - George Colony, Chairman and CEO —